“You okay?” he asks because he knows me, and he knows I’m not.
I shake my head while contradicting myself. “I’m fine. Let’s just eat and stop focusing on all things me and Maia.”
We do eat and we joke and mercifully Maia puts her clothes back on and I try not to watch her all through dinner.
But on the car ride home, I ask something I’ve been wondering about since she first told me. “Why are you a virgin?”
Her head swivels in my direction, but I can’t glance over long enough to meet her eyes. I have no business asking this question, but I have to know the answer all the same.
“That’s hardly a question a boss should ask his employee.”
No. It’s certainly not. “And asking about the women I have sex with is hardly a question an employee should ask her employer. Humor me.”
“Why does it matter?”
I don’t know. But it does. Everything about her suddenly matters. Even when it shouldn’t. “I’d like to know if you’re okay with telling me.”
“You know everything about me, Keith, and yet I know so little about you.”
“You’re looking for a little reciprocity?”
“Yeah. Maybe I am. You’re getting personal with me. It’s only fair.”
“Okay. Answer this for me and I’ll answer something in return.”
Finally, after an eternity of dark silence, she says, “It wasn’t some methodical, well-thought-out plan. It just sort of happened that way.”
“Explain,” I say gruffly, tossing her favorite freaking word back at her.
She huffs and puffs a little, but then she settles down. Then she shifts just a little closer to me. Enough so I can smell the salt from the saltwater pool on her skin. Enough so that I catch the hint of jasmine in her hair.
“In high school, girls in my town got knocked up like that’s just what kids did on Friday nights. Many of those girls didn’t graduate high school. They didn’t go on to become whatever they imagined themselves being when they were seven. They could have, even with a baby. But instead they got pregnant and stayed at home because that’s just what people from my town did. And the douchebags who injected their semen inside them didn’t care so much that they now had kids. Condoms aren’t free. They’re expensive and getting birth control where I grew up required parental consent and insurance. So I abstained. I didn’t like any of the STI kings who walked the halls of my school anyway.”
“And when you went to college?”
She shrugs her bad shoulder. “I don’t know. Old habits die hard? College boys liked my tits. They liked my ass. And they wanted to fuck both. But I can’t remember any one of them asking me what I was majoring in. Or what I wanted to do as a career after college. Or even what my name was.”
She says that last bit with a harsh bite and I get the connotation behind it immediately.
Because I told her point blank I didn’t care about the names of the women I fucked. And I didn’t. They didn’t care about my name either other than the fact that it was tied to someone who is rich and famous and plays drums in a band. In that respect, it’s not much better. It might even be worse.
I used them for their bodies. They used me for my celebrity.
But I know Maia. I know her name and I want to know her story. Every facet of it.
“What about after you moved here?”
She huffs once more, so very done with my questions. “More of the same, Keith. Sex wasn’t exactly on my mind. Surviving was. Paying off the debts in my name was. I was already at the point where I had held out long enough so why squander something that should still be considered precious on just anyone.”
I don’t want to be just anyone to her. It’s troubling the hell out of me.
Since the second I saw her, I’ve wanted to be everything to this girl. Her hero. Her savior. Her knight. Her lover. Her friend. And then she went and kissed me and screwed that all up. Because now I don’t just want those things. I crave them. I need them.
But I have no right to them. I haven’t gotten close to any woman for a reason.
“I’m glad you’re still a virgin. I’m glad you have dreams beyond where you grew up. I’m glad you want more from your life. And I fucking love how you fight for it.”
Maia swallows loudly. It’s the sort of sound that someone does when they’re trying to hold their emotions in. And before I know what I’m doing, I reach out into the darkness of the car and play with a strand of her hair.
Her breath catches deep in her throat but it’s dark in the car and it’s dark outside and I can’t look at her. Looking at her makes me want to kiss her again and I cannot kiss her again.
“I’m not sorry I kissed you,” she says. “I know you want me to be. I think you’re sorry I did. But I’m not.”
I shake my head. Suddenly so inexplicably and wrongfully angry. Because Maia kissed me. Why the fuck did she have to do that?
I want Maia in a way I never even wanted anyone else, and I’ve only known her two weeks. I loved Amy but I never spent hours awake at night thinking about all the ways I wanted her. I never stared at her because I couldn’t stop. I never teased and provoked her because her reactions to me never did to me half of what Maia’s do.
And I hate it.
I loathe it. It’s so wrong it twists inside me, corrosively burning a hole through me and eating me alive from the inside out. I should have been like that with Amy. Maybe then…
You’re gutting me, Maia, and I have no fucking clue what to do about that.
I know you want me just as much as I want you. I do not want to get attached to you. I do not want to get emotionally involved.
Especially with a girl who already has so much power over me. With a girl I’m already going above and beyond for. Helping in any way I can. Putting every ounce of who I am on the line.
Just like I did with Amy.
And look how that turned out.
“I am no different from those boys in college,” I bite out. “I want your body in every dirty, depraved way possible. I want to tie you up by your wrists and lick your pussy until it’s dripping all over my bed and my face. Down into your tight little asshole. I want your breathy moans and your pleading. I want you to beg for my cock to break open that tight, untouched pussy of yours. Then I want your tears because it hurts so fucking good for you. That’s how fucked up I am with you. Is that what you want to hear? Does that sound safe?” Each question bellows louder past my lips. “I want your trust, dammit. I want to be a good guy in your story. And you constantly try to force me over into the darkness.”
Without warning, she reaches up, grabs my hand out of her hair, and tugs it onto her lap. And she just holds it. So tight. Squeezing me.
“I trust you,” she tells me, and I fucking crack. Wide. Open. My heart is raw and exposed, and I can’t stand this. This fucking feeling. It’s terrorizing. It’s thrusting me to the very brink of my sanity and my wits. She grasps my wrists, holding it firm as I try to flee. “I trust you,” she repeats.
“You shouldn’t. The things I want to do to you…”
“What would that feel like? Those things?”
“Stop it. Stop being such a naughty, naughty tease.”